“Wouldn’t the money do good—­as much good as any other hundred thousand dollars?” asked Margaret.

“Perhaps.  But the professorship was to bear his name, and what would be the moral effect of that?”

“Did you recommend the president to take the money, if he could get it without using the gambler’s name?”

“I am not saying yet what I advised.  I am trying to get your views on a general principle.”

“But wouldn’t it be a sneaking thing to take a man’s money, and refuse him the credit of his generosity?”

“But was it generosity?  Was not his object, probably, to get a reputation which his whole life belied, and to get it by obliterating the distinction between right and wrong?”

“But isn’t it a compromising distinction,” my wife asked, “to take his money without his name?  The president knows that it is money fraudulently got, that really belongs to somebody else; and the gambler would feel that if the president takes it, he cannot think very disapprovingly of the manner in which it was acquired.  I think it would be more honest and straightforward to take his name with the money.”

“The public effect of connecting the gambler’s name with the college would be debasing,” said Morgan; “but, on the contrary, is every charity or educational institution bound to scrutinize the source of every benefaction?  Isn’t it better that money, however acquired, should be used for a good purpose than a bad one?”

“That is a question,” I said, “that is a vital one in our present situation, and the sophistry of it puzzles the public.  What would you say to this case?  A man notoriously dishonest, but within the law, and very rich, offered a princely endowment to a college very much in need of it.  The sum would have enabled it to do a great work in education.  But it was intimated that the man would expect, after a while, to be made one of the trustees.  His object, of course, was social position.”

“I suppose, of course,” Margaret replied, “that the college couldn’t afford that.  It would look like bribery.”

“Wouldn’t he be satisfied with an ll.D.?” Morgan asked.

“I don’t see,” my wife said, “any difference between the two cases stated and that of the stock gambler, whose unscrupulous operations have ruined thousands of people, who founds a theological seminary with the gains of his slippery transactions.  By accepting his seminary the public condones his conduct.  Another man, with the same shaky reputation, endows a college.  Do you think that religion and education are benefited in the long-run by this?  It seems to me that the public is gradually losing its power of discrimination between the value of honesty and dishonesty.  Real respect is gone when the public sees that a man is able to buy it.”

This was a hot speech for my wife to make.  For a moment Margaret flamed up under it with her old-time indignation.  I could see it in her eyes, and then she turned red and confused, and at length said: